Unhappy meal

How to eat yourself to death.

By Mary Roach

Dec 3, 1999 | Thanksgiving evening, between the second yam and the first piece of pie, a thought crossed my mind. Actually, it was a series of thoughts, and it went like this: Is it possible to eat yourself to death? If I keep on eating, will my stomach eventually burst? How much food would it take?

I am not the first person to have had these thoughts. The first person, so far as I am able to verify, was a Frenchman named E. Revilloid. The year was 1885. Revilloid not only had these thoughts, but undertook to answer them in a scientific manner, filling up a stomach (removed from its deceased gentilhomme owner) until it burst. The rupture threshold was determined to be 4,000 cc, or about four quarts. Six years later, a German physician by the name of Key-Aberg repeated the experiment. (The German of yesteryear was a hearty eater, a fact borne out in a ghastly 1929 Annals of Surgery article. The paper summarizes 14 cases of fatal overeating, including a 17-year-old female done in by a "large portion of sauerkraut.")

Key-Aberg's experiment differed from his French predecessor in that he left the stomachs inside their (dead) owners. He presumably felt that this would better approximate the realities of a hearty meal, for rare indeed is the dinner party attended by disengaged, free-standing stomachs. To that same end, he is said to have made a point of composing his corpses in the sitting position. Again, 4,000 cc was the reported cutoff.

As fans of the eating sections in old Guinness books of world records will surmise, this figure has been surpassed on numerous occasions. Some stomachs, by way of heredity or prolonged daily gourmandism, are roomier than average. Orson Welles had one such stomach. According to the owners of Pink's hot dog stand in Los Angeles, the voluminous director once sat down and finished off 18 hot dogs.

The all-time record holder would appear to be a 23-year-old London fashion model whose case was described in the April 1985 issue of Lancet. At one fateful meal, the young woman managed to put away 19 pounds of food: one pound of liver, two pounds of kidney, a half pound steak, one pound of cheese, two eggs, two thick slices of bread, one cauliflower, 10 peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, two pounds each of plums, carrots and grapes, and two glasses of milk. Whereupon her stomach blew up and she died. (The human gastrointestinal tract is home to trillions of bacteria, which, should they escape the confines of their stinky, labyrinthine home, can create a massive and often fatal systemic infection.)

Runner-up goes to a 31-year-old Florida psychologist who was found collapsed in her kitchen surrounded by "an abundance of foodstuffs, broken soft drink bottles and an empty grocery bag," to quote a lavishly if repellently illustrated article in a 1986 American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. In her purse was a hospital form from several hours earlier, indicating that she had consumed five pounds of hot dogs, three boxes of crackers and two quarts of milk before driving herself to the emergency room and complaining of abdominal pain. The staff dutifully pumped nearly two quarts of material from her stomach, whereupon she returned home, only to start all over again -- this time with lethal results. The Dade County medical examiner's report itemized the fatal last meal: "8700 cc of poorly masticated, undigested hot dogs, broccoli and cereal suspended in a green liquid that contained numerous small bubbles." The green liquid remains a mystery, as does the apparent widespread appeal of hot dogs among modern-day gorgers.

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